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Rebellion has announced that the gorgeous and abstract virtual reality adventure Arca's Path will release on 4 December 2018 for all major VR platforms. The hands-free game, developed by British developer Dream Reality Interactive, has you guiding a curious ball using only your gaze.

More than any other video game, Arca’s Path can feel like a warm and hazy memory. This beautiful virtual-reality platformer from British start-up Dream Reality Interactive has a woozy abstraction, having you guide a ball around shifting, organic courses. Like a surreal game of crazy golf.

The catch? You guide this mysterious ball using only your head. As you drop into each of the weaving, undulating courses you simply look where you want to go. A cursor matches your gaze and the ball follows suit. Peer ahead and the ball speeds up, look directly at it and the sphere will come to an instant stop.

From here you carefully guide the ball round bends and up moving platforms. Veteran players of Super Monkey Ball or Marble Madness will be familiar with the concept. But the method of control, gently weaving your noggin while immersed in this dreamy world of mint-green and pink, is something new.

“When we started DRI about 18 months ago, the question we asked ourselves was what VR mechanic could we do that would run on any headset,” says CEO and founder of Dream Reality Interactive, David Ranyard. “The thinking was to remove all the different controllers and thought wouldn’t it be cool to do something that could just be on the headsets. That was where we started. And we wanted to make it relaxing with some challenge and a beautiful art style.”

A relative virtual reality veteran, Ranyard is the former head of Sony’s London Studio, responsible for developing titles outside of ‘traditional’ gaming such as SingStar and the Harry Potter themed Wonderbook. The studio also worked on PSVR launch title VR Worlds, a compendium of small virtual reality experiences designed to show off Sony’s headset.

Arca's Path has you guiding a ball around lush courses using only your headCredit:
Dream Reality Interactive

A desire to break out led Ranyard to form Dream Reality Interactive, which explores experiences using technology such as VR and augmented reality. Its first game was an AR game for mobile called Orbu, which projected small golf courses onto the real world which you then play on using the touch screen.

But games are not DRI’s only interest. “We were part of a group that worked on a project with David Attenborough, where there is a hologram of him in the Natural History Museum funded by Sky TV,” says Ranyard. “We were the interactive people, we did all the code. We have got a couple of projects, one is in health and one is in education and VR is very powerful for both of those spaces. There is a lot you can do in VR for mental health. They’re interesting projects for us, I think it’s great for the team to have the opportunity to do something that’s for good like that.”

Arca’s Path is the immediate concern and is the small team’s biggest project to date. It is being marketed and distributed by Strange Brigade and Sniper Elite developers Rebellion and is headed to most VR headsets on the market.

And despite its visual abstraction, Arca’s Path is very deliberately a game that’s easy to understand. “Everyone knows what a ball is and the physics of a ball. And we liked platformers, so we started playing around and after a few months work we ended up with the ball following the cursor,” says Ranyard. “We’ve done a lot of iteration on that to get it the right size and move the right distance and make it nice and smooth as you move around.”

Indeed, it is startling just how precise the control you have over the sphere in Arca’s Path is. Using your head may set off alarm bells for some, but it is immediately intuitive, with gentle tilts and weaves getting your ball where you need it to go.

“It’s one of those things where something that simple is quite a lot of work to get it right,” says Ranyard. “Are you looking there or there? How fast should the ball be based on the distance? But we also have where you look at the base of the ball you can stop it. So if someone wants precise control then they’ve got it, they can stop it, move slowly, quicker. It’s just a lot of iteration and playtesting. I’ve said to people: whatever game you make, do one thing really well and, hopefully, that’s what we’ve done.”

To that end, the behaviour of the sphere will remain constant throughout the game. The complexity and progression will come with the courses, with extra challenge added as the player progresses. Arca’s Path already has a terrific visual language which makes everything easy to understand, even the sphere’s unique shape is designed so you know how fast it is travelling, and Ranyard says that also comes from iteration and using building blocks to build each level.

“We have almost like a Lego box of pre-made parts,” he says. “They can then trigger things so there’s movement, with drawbridges and objects you can move around. You do need to give the player time to learn the flow of the game and to create a bit of a language of levels. So as a player you go ‘ah, I’ve seen that there but now it’s combined with this’. It’s about giving them time to experiment.”

Beyond the mechanical expertise of Arca’s Path, DRI are keen to make the game as engaging and experiential as possible. There is a gentle narrative, with a young girl tempted into Arca’s labyrinth by a mysterious mask that transforms her into the sphere. “There’s no text, no dialogue, so you can use your imagination,” says Ranyard. “The inciting incident reminds me of Slumdog Millionaire where the two boys are living on the scrapheap and someone comes along and gives them an ice cold Coca-Cola. And he’s like wow, here’s this heavenly opportunity to get out of this horrible place. It’s a fairytale, where a witch comes along and seems nice… but perhaps isn’t. It’s as simple as that. We’ve been talking to our kids about things like this for centuries.”

Credit:
Dream Reality Interactive

The story is told in painterly comic panels drawn by Anna Hollinrake, a young artist and one of BAFTA’s Breakthrough Brits in 2017. Ranyard describes Hollinrake’s passion for ‘sci-fi fairytale’, which is about an apt a description of Arca’s Path as you could care to find.

Another emerging British talent contributing to Arca’s Path is DJ and composer Raffertie, whose lilting, bassy electronica soundtracks your movement around the game’s bends. It blends delightfully with the ball’s progress. At one point as I was careening down one of the game’s lengthy ramps, the tinkle of the ball’s movements syncing with the soundtrack.

“When we first heard his music we kind of knew, as it has an organic but glitchy feel, kind of like the game,” says Ranyard. “I think about it as three things really, the simplicity of the mechanics of the game, the visual style and the music. Those three things together make this great experience, because then you layer the story on top and it makes the whole package.”

This holistic, and eminently sensible, approach has created a intoxicating, involving landscape that was dreamily simple to lose yourself in. Virtual reality has not made the impact on video games that some were expecting, but it is still a form that allows for both mechanical experimentation and all-encompassing landscapes. For that, Arca’s Path is on the right track.